1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of computerized publication of documents, and more particularly to a method for publishing documents using XML on networks such as the Word Wide Web and the ability to publish documents for different device types such as computers, PDAs, cell phones and print.
2. Description of the Related Art
Web sites often present content which is constantly changing. Presenting current information to the outside world without requiring an inordinate amount of human effort and computing power is a major technical challenge to Web site designers.
Multimedia content including text, graphics, video and sound on the Internet needs to be highly adaptive. Recently the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) adopted the Extensible Markup Language (XML) as a universal format for structured documents and data on the Web. The base specifications are XML 1.0, W3C Recommendation February '98. See online URL (www.w3.org) for more information. A content management system based on XML along with (Extensible Stylesheet Language) XSL enforces separation of content and presentation, thus allowing flexible rendering of the content to multiple device types. Similarly, such a content management system allows maximal reuse of information and data through the composition of XML fragments as well as ensures data integrity through the consistent use of information.
In addition to the availability of XML, new interfaces and devices are emerging, the diversity of users is increasing, machines are acting more and more on users' behalf, and net activities are possible for a wide range of business, leisure, education, and research activities.
Systems and methods are being developed for generating more flexible content and a capability to manage frequent changes to content. One system for achieving maximum flexibility and reuse is disclosed in the patent application entitled “Method and System for Efficiently Constructing And Consistently Publishing Web Documents” filed on Apr. 4, 1999 with application Ser. No. 09/283,542 with inventors JR Challenger et al. now [Pending] and commonly assigned herewith to International Business Machines. Disclosed is a system and method where the multimedia content is broken down into fragments that can be combined into published documents.
The use of XML in content management systems introduces the following new challenges:
1. A need exists to maintain information about the functional and semantic role of each richly tagged fragment. This information describes what the content is about, who the target audience is, and its relationship to a taxonomy or other fragments. The same mechanism should support efficient searches of particular fragments.
2. A need exists for an efficient method to track the effects of changes in a particular richly tagged fragment or style and propagate those changes throughout the information space.
3. A need exists for a user interface that shields the content contributor from knowing the underlying syntax and complexities of the XML documents;
4. A need exists for finding relevant document fragments on demand, keeping track of the dependencies between document fragments, transforming combinations of those document fragments into viewable pages available to multiple device types, and designing a content creation tool that does not overwhelm the contributor with the details and the complexities of the underlying system.
Accordingly, a need exists for a system and method that manages and publishes the information content of a Web site, or an Internet information portal, in a way that separates the information from the form and reuses the stored information and enables the presentation in the user interface to be customized for different audiences and target devices and media.
Other prior art systems/tools that relate to the XML editing include markup languages that use XML to declaratively specify user interfaces, fully functioning editors, and systems that publish XML documents. Bluestone Software's XwingML [for more information refer to URL www.bluestone.com] enables the creation of Java Swing user interfaces without coding. The GUI (Graphical User Interface) is declaratively specified in XML and is translated into working Java code. This approach separates the GUI code from the application logic. Their DTD specifies the entire set of classes and properties for all of Swing components. However, the Bluestone Software's XwingML creates arbitrary interfaces in a declarative fashion rather than creating specific interfaces that reflect the document types for a given publishing environment. Accordingly a need exists for a method and tool to accomplish creating specific interfaces that reflect the document types for a given publishing environment.
Another prior art editor for XML is XmetaL, from Softquad, [refer to online URL www.xmetal.com] which is a flexible XML editor that supports three views into XML files. These views include raw XML mode, Tags-On mode that provides a WYSIWYG presentation with direct access to elements and attributes, and a full WYSIWYG mode in a word-processor like environment. The XmetaL tool although useful has the problem that separate style sheets need to be used to support the editing vs. the publishing process. In addition, one stylesheet may not include all of the elements that would be used on other platforms or for different uses. Accordingly, a content editor is needed that separates the content from presentation and the reusability of that content on different delivery environments such as PCs, PDAs and phones.
Still another prior art content editor system is Interwoven [refer to online URL www.interwoven.com] which is a complete publishing system that supports HTML as well as XML. It provides an end to end solution from content creation to promotion and publishing. It also has a templating tool that provides the means to produce form-based pages. However, its support of reusable fragments within the environment is rather limited and the publishing to viewable pages is performed using non-standard methods.
Accordingly a need exists for a method and tool to accomplish creating and reusing content fragments using standard methods for a given publishing environment.